Inescapably cinematic

Offaly Independent announces some of the upcoming events at the That Beats Banagher Festival:

The second weekend of the festival, Friday to Sunday, July 21 to 23, will be devoted to celebrating Charlotte Brontë and her husband Arthur Bell Nicholls of Banagher. The programme includes three films, a tapestry and stitchcraft exhibition, three talks, two poetry readings and two heritage walks. Speakers and readers include Maebh O'Regan, Eileen Casey, Frances Browner, Joanne Wilcock, Michael O'Dowd, Kieran Keenaghan and James Scully. All events will be held in or start from The Crank House on lower Main Street. The events are free but donations will be most welcome. For full details go to the That Beats Banagher festival website in the highlights under culture and heritage.

Daily Mail publishes pictures of The Most Wuthering Heights Day Ever celebration in Sydney, Australia:

Every July, fans all across the globe get together in various cities to dance and celebrate what's called The Most Wuthering Heights Day Ever.

On Saturday, hundreds of dancers in red flowing frocks gathered at Sydney's inner city park to mimic the performer's unique choreography from her 1978 music video for Wuthering Heights. 

In the haunting video, Kate dances and sings in a red dress, with the track inspired by characters in Emile (sic) Brontë's classic 1847 novel of the same name.

The Most Wuthering Heights Day Ever celebrates the famous song worldwide in various places and coincides with Bush's birthday. (Ciara O'Loughlin)

NPORadio5 (Netherlands), Newcastle Herald and Stuff do the same for the Amsterdam, Newcastle and Dunedin events. 

Blueprint (Nigeria) interviews the poet Sodiq Alabi:

What does writing mean to you?

Writing is one of the greatest inventions of humanity as it allows us to be able to record our experiences, knowledge, and creativity for posterity. Writing is the reason I could read about events that took place 2000 years ago in pre-Islamic Arabia through its poetry or enjoy a story created by Emily Brontë in mid-19th century England. It is what allows us to expand our minds beyond the scope of our immediate place, time, and reality.

Forbes looks into how to get kids to read for fun:

Working with a sample of about 350 12- and 13-year-olds who were average or poor readers, the researchers had teachers read aloud “two whole challenging novels at a faster pace than usual.”  (...)

I’ve observed this phenomenon myself in other contexts, and I’ve heard about it from educators. I’ve seen teachers read aloud from engaging novels—even, on one occasion, the rather challenging Jane Eyre—and watched students of various ages become mesmerized. (Natalie Wexler)

Hadley Freeman's column in The Sunday Times is about Barbie:

Fat women in books are monstrous, comical and repulsive (Miss Trunchbull in Matilda); thin ones are saintly, beautiful and heroic (Miss Honey in the same book). This was even more true in the books I loved as a pre-teen, from Sweet Valley High to Jane Eyre. Fatness, like ugliness, has long been shorthand for authors, especially those writing for young people, to communicate: “This girl is bad.” But I learnt that message in other ways, too.

Also in The Sunday Times, the best albums of 2023 so far:

[Bernard] Herrmann

Suite from Wuthering Heights; Echoes for Strings

★★★★☆

Keri Fuge (soprano), Roderick Williams (baritone), Singapore Symphony Orchestra, cond Mario Venzago, Joshua Tan

Chandos

Synonymous with Alfred Hitchcock, for whom he wrote some of the greatest and most audacious film scores in the history of Hollywood, Bernard Herrmann had many other strings to his bow. Among them was his opera, Wuthering Heights, inspired by a love for the novels of the Brontë sisters that began when he scored the 1943 screen adaptation of Jane Eyre. The challenge for the listener is in drawing a dividing line between Herrmann’s works for cinema and those he wrote with his other hats on, and Hans Sorensen’s suite of excerpts, and the performances of it here, makes that at once straightforward and complicated. The first scene of Act I, with writing for orchestra and soloists that is alternately astringent and blowsy, is a case in point. The orchestration is astonishingly rich and nuanced, but it is, yes, also inescapably cinematic. The same goes for Echoes for Strings, beautiful and persuasive though the piece is. No matter, this accomplished recording is a deeply rewarding listen. (Dan Cairns)

AussieTheatre interviews Bernardette Robinson, star of DIVAS:

Gabi Bergman: Do you have a favourite song or moment from this show?

B.R.: Not at the moment, because there are so many that I’m really learning and learning to love. Miley I’m enjoying singing… As Streisand I sing Sondheim’s “Being Alive”, which I’ve never sung before. Kate Bush is another I’m just really enjoying – I sing “Wuthering Heights”, of course, but also “Running Up That Hill”… and it’s been fun learning those ones.